Flesh in the Furnace by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page B

next to his right ear.
        And then it all came back to Sebastian, and be left that room and vomited in the hallway at the disgust he felt at what he had done.
        
        He had been all over the theater, looking into all of the rooms, touching everything he saw, though he did not know what it was that he was after. In time, it became dear to him that he felt better in those rooms where the old puppet master had been. He spent a long time in the lightman's perch, tracing his blunt fingers over the grips of the spotlight, around and around the buttons and the knob-headed toggles of the console that controlled the stage effects. He stood a full hour on the stairs leading from the perch that Pertos had trod before and after each performance. It was almost as if he could feel the places the old man's shoes had worn in the concrete. Once, he fancied he felt the vibrations of other feet on those stairs, though there was no one else about, and that thought suddenly terrified him so much that he ran from that dark, back area to the stage where he sat by the footlights he had turned on, trying to imagine there was an audience this morning. But when he forced a shimmering vision of people, they were all Pertos Godelhausser, and he had to run again, crying and frightened.
        He spent a while with the newly painted props that he had been lacquering the night before, hunting Pertos' emanations on them, the sign that the puppeteer had been here, had worked here, had lived.
        Then he went back to be certain Pertos was dead, for it had occurred to him that Pertos had never died before, that his life story didn't permit death. Had Pertos been living another story, then, too?
        Pertos was dead. Blood. Bone. Staring eyes.
        He carried the corpse to the Furnace and attempted to feed it inside, with the notion that he could then have Pertos re-created. All. he would have to do was read the nobs, learn to use the knobs. And find out which of the identity wafers would reproduce Pertos. But the Furnace refused to accept the human meat.
        Sebastian spilled all the identity wafers out and looked for something he might recognize as Pertos' name. He had no luck. Then he thought he could look for his own identity wafer, and maybe there would be something about it that would help him find Pertos. Only he and Pertos were big, while Bitty Belina and the others were small. That might mean that he and Pertos had different identity discs. He looked through the wafers four times before he was willing to admit that there was no disc for him. And probably none for Pertos either.
        And then he felt sadder than ever.
        Just before noon, while Sebastian was outside examining the truck, feeling for the past and finding mostly cold vinyl and icy metal, Trimkin came with two men. They were a different pair, though Sebastian could not be expected to notice that Trimkin seemed always to be accompanied by different men each time, all of them bland.
        "Is your master about?" Trimkin asked the idiot. Sebastian almost said yes, the master is inside, before he realized that no one should ever see Petros now. If anyone saw what he had done to Pertos, they would lock him away, like they would have done over jenny, and then he would be dead himself, chained up in darkness.
        "Lose your tongue?" Trimkin asked, smiling. He seemed a pleasant man. Pertos, however, could have told Sebastian that Trimkin had seemed pleasant even while he had supervised the beating his men had dealt the puppet master.
        "No," Sebastian said.
        It was not a cold day really, but he was freezing. He wanted to go back into the theater, but he didn't dare lead them there.
        "No what? No, your master isn't about? Or, no, you still have your tongue?" Sebastian looked around the cab of the truck where he was sitting, back through the open door at Trimkin.
        "I guess he's inside," Trimkin said.
        "No!"